Theresa Gale and Mary Anne Wampler are co-authors of Wake Up and SELL!. Recently they were interviewed about their thoughts on sales and selling. Here’s what they had to say:
Theresa – “I wake up every day saying “I love what I do.” What a gift really to be able to love what you do and get paid doing it. If someone had of told me 15 years ago that I would have to sell to do what I love to do I’d say they were crazy. I was an Administrative Manager at a computer service company handling everything but sales. I believed I wouldn’t be good at it and plus I didn’t want the pressure that came with sales. I’d find myself admiring the successful sales people and wishing I could do what they did, but knew that it just wasn’t for me. Five years later I’m at a sales training class because I’m working at a consulting firm and need to learn how to sell. What I very quickly learned was that my beliefs about sales and selling were what would keep me from enjoying success as a sales person and as a consultant, so I decided to do something about those beliefs … and the rest is history!”
Mary Anne, a seasoned sales professional responds: “As much as I love consulting, training and coaching, to this very day it still thrills me to be sitting with a prospect or client. Listening to their problems, exploring desires for their business, asking just the right question to discover what’s really going on, designing a solution and closing the deal. It’s fun, it’s thrilling, it’s real and it matters. I clearly remember my Dad asking me, after my first few years as a sales trainer, “When are you going to get a real job?” It was in my automatic response to him that showed me I truly understood the importance that selling and being a sales trainer holds. My response was simply “nothing happens in business until someone sells something”.
